Culinary Science (honours)

Course manual 2025/2026

Course content

Innovation in Science has long influenced culinary arts, while creative cooking has reciprocally driven scientific breakthroughs. This course delves into the relationship between food and science, showcasing how simple kitchen phenomena inspire discoveries in molecular gastronomy, chemistry, physics and soft condensed matter physics. Cooking involves manipulating soft materials to create desired tastes, textures, and visual aspect, making the underlying physico-chemistry complex yet fundamental. This course capitalizes on the science of cooking to introduce students to key concepts in chemistry, physics and soft condensed matter physics.

Structured like a 'menu,' each module explores the various interdisciplinary facets of chemistry, and soft condensed matter physics. The topics span from comprehending staple food products such as bread (considering aspects such as rising dough), sauces to desserts like chocolate mousse, which exhibit peculiar texture and stability, and drinks such as coffee, beer  and wine. Specific topics will include:

• Stability: Organisation of matter, molecular aspect, interfacial phenomena.
• Texture and perception: Complex fluids, Food rheology.
• Fluid mechanics and hydrodynamic instabilities.
• Network & Percolation

Recommended prior knowledge

• Thermodynamics physics, Statistical Physics.
• Fluids & Soft Matter course.

Study materials

Literature

• Soft Matter: Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications," Wim van Saarloos, Vincenzo Vitelli, and Zorana Zeravcic, Princeton University Press, 2024, ISBN 0393634930-9780691191300.

• Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, From Homemade to Haute Cuisine", Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, David Weitz, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020, ISBN 0393634930-9780393634938.

• Soft Condensed Matter", R.A.L. Jones, ISBN 978-0198505891.

Practical training material

• Cooking at home

   

Objectives

• Students will be able to describe and explain the fundamental concepts of soft matter food systems that govern their stability and texture.
• Students will know how to determine the stability, rheology of simple food products.
• Students will be able to apply mathematical tools to analyze and explain the stability, rheological behavior, and texture of food products.
• Students will design and carry out an experiment, and present a comprehensive analysis of the texture, stability, or appearance of a selected food product through an oral and/or visual presentation.

Teaching methods

• Lecture
• Seminar
• Self-study
• Working independently on e.g. a project or thesis

Learning activities

Attendance

Programme's requirements concerning attendance (TER-B):

• Each student is expected to participate actively in each component of the programme that he/she signed up for. A student that does not attend the first two seminars of a course, will be administratively removed from the seminar group. A request for reregistration for the seminars can be applied to the programme coordinator.
• If a student cannot attend an obligatory component of a programme's component due to circumstances beyond his control, he must report in writing to the relevant teacher as soon as possible. The teacher, if necessary after consulting the study adviser, may decide to issue the student a replacing assignment.
• It is not allowed to miss obligatory commponents of the programme if there is no case of circumstances beyond one's control.
• In case of participating qualitatively or quantitatively insufficiently, the examiner can expel a student from further participation in the programme's component or a part of that component. Conditions for sufficient participation are set down in advance in the course manual.

Assessment

Fraud and plagiarism

The 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' applies to this course. This will be monitored carefully. Upon suspicion of fraud or plagiarism the Examinations Board of the programme will be informed. For the 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' see: www.student.uva.nl

Course structure

Contact information

Coordinator

• dr. Antoine Deblais

Staff

• prof. dr. Daniel Bonn
• dr. ir. I.M. Ilie
• prof. dr. N.F. Shahidzadeh
• prof. dr. Krassimir Velikov
• Sander Woutersen